Sega-16: You arrived at Sega when the company was at its peak and you left after the Dreamcast had been discontinued and focus shifted to creating games for multiple platforms. What was it like seeing such a great hardware company give up making consoles?
Toshiyasu Morita: It really wasn't a great shock to see Sega giving up hardware. Internally, many of us had been talking about this for at least three or four years before the event happened. My impression was that since Sega started out as a hardware company, most of the senior people in management were hardware people, and therefore they didn't want to view the company as a software company because it would mean they were no longer relevant.
One very sad thing I see is Sony following directly in Sega's footsteps. The Playstation hardware is becoming more difficult to program and also more expensive. If this trend continues, Sony may be forced to exit the hardware market eventually also.
True and False. Gray matters.
False,
The reason Dreamcast exit, illustrates a precedent for the effects of mass Copy Theft on the gaming market.
The simplicity of its security was quickly defected without hardware modification. And there was no end in sight.
Same could happen to any console on the market including handhelds. We should be mindful of this.
My Dreamcast was the first console I ever fully paid for before launch, then kept and loved.
The emotional gong of Sega's financial losses and mediocre showing was an extremely humbling moment.
Microsoft convinced Sega that it would be a great idea to let Microsoft them help create the Dreamcast.
What Microsoft didn’t tell them is that they were doing it to learn about creating their own console.
Within just a few months of Dreamcast launching on 9-9-1999, Microsoft starts issuing press releases for Xbox.
Then Microsoft starts advertising for there Xbox platform throughout 2000, even shipping development kits out by July 2000.
Furthermore Microsoft goes back to all the developers it met with while
helping Dreamcast launch the year before and tells them you already have Windows tools,
Here is a windows based Development kit one year after the Windows CE version Sega gave you.
Adding insult to injury, Has anyone noticed that the
Xbox360 controller looks like
Dreamcast’s +
Controller?
Even the week before Christmas
Microsoft Announces the worldwide release plans for Xbox to give people cause to not spend their money that Christmas.
Do to the lack of sales & additional competition, the next month on January 31, 2001 Sega announced it would be withdrawing from the market.
Microsoft helped kill Dreamcast by pretending to work as a consultant, when it was really the competition getting paid to do its own research.
I wasn’t any happier when Microsoft financially helped Immersion sue Sony and was granted an injunction blocking Dual Shock from the PS3.
True, he is precisely correct.
A console can only go so far when it sells for a high price, at a high loss, AND is difficult to develop games for.
That nearly happened this time. The first runtime and dev kit was ABSOLUTELY CRAPPY TO WORK WITH so the whole market was largely sour.
The saving grace is that PS2 was still going strong and had a similar start, so top developer were hopeful that the programming would again work out.
If not for Developers previous success with PS2, Sony Computer Entertainment would have had to close shop. Period.
(The PS2 was at capable of out of order execution, and did not require programming by proxy extensions to SPE, whatever that was?)
Grey Matters,
Had the following been present at launch the issue would not have been so depressingly doom and gloom.
The saving grace for development right now is SDK 3.0 (with an April 07 miracle called Runtime 2.1) and a fix for fatal stalls.
As well as new and improved developer tools, plus real university taught education programs.
(PlaystationEdge, PhyreEngine, MIT, CIT, GeorgiaTech, USC, etc, etc)
Quite frankly parallel processing was too advanced/new an idea for most gaming studios to develop for.
Even on the PC, only the very largest studios were in 2007 just beginning to use multi-threaded engines.
So it was critically to get into the educational institutions and teach multi-core architecture, ISA's, and programming structures.
This way developer would be able to work for themselves and not rely on reworking other game's engine.
Now that is happening and developers again have hope for the following development cycles will be much better.
Consumers....I am not at liberty to say too much about. (Overkill is, as overkill writes.)
But I will say that right now the games are working and looking a lot better than they did this time last year.
Plus, there is a demo or two being shown under NDA that has the press gob-smackingly glowing about the future.
The online PlayStation Network and HOME may have taken 2 years but it is finally looking good.
A few key developers are deciding it would be smarter to start using the PS3 as their lead platform.
Oh and Dual Shock 3 finally had a date for April or June of 2008! (Yet another reason that PS3 was almost DOA.)
Halleluiah! I may now buy one for myself.
(Blu-Ray, PlayTV DVR/Slingbox/DRM-Free, Yellow Dog Linux 6, Skype PSP, RemotePlay, Resistance FoM 2, MGS4, LBP, GT5, Uncharted, R&CF:ToD, HOME, etc)
